Tip #20 – Time to Pay the Bills!

Finally we get to monetizing your blog! One of the easiest ways to monetize a blog is to include contextual advertising such as Google AdSense or Yahoo Publishers Network ads on your blog.

These ads are easy because the search engines so all of the matching work for you. All you have to do is copy the ad code and paste it onto your blog page. There are different formats and sizes to select from, and nifty color options help you blend the ads into the carefully researched look and feel of your website.

On the down side, all contextual ads open in the same window. This means that when a reader clicks on an ad on your blog they are instantly taken away from your blog and show an advertised product. The result is a giant sucking sound in your readership numbers.

To help counter this effect on my blog, I have chosen not to place contextual advertisements on my blog’s main index page. However, if a reader clicks on a post title to read more, they will then see the ads. The logic is then I get at least a couple page views and I know that my readers have consumed at least a little of my content before moving on. If I have done my job right, they will be back for more later.

The last bit of advice on contextual advertising is that unless you have a top 100 blog, you will not get rich off of it. (But if you had a top 100 blog there are so many better ways to use ad space anyway). I look at contextual advertising as a great way to pay my hosting bill while at the same time covering the cost of *some* of the diet coke I drank while writing the posts 🙂